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Thrasher editor Jake Phelps’ devotion to skateboarding transcended community at large

Annie VainshteinMarch 14, 2019Updated: March 17, 2019, 11:18 am

Jake Phelps, editor of Thrasher magazine, appears in 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Photo: Astrid Stawiarz, Getty Images 2009

At Deluxe Skateshop on Friday afternoon, Brian Slattery was hanging up one of Jake Phelps’ boards on the wall. The Market Street store is where the skateboarding icon and longtime Thrasher magazine editor would often hang out before or after hitting a half-pipe or a rail at a San Francisco park. The staff always kept at least two of Phelps’ preferred old-school decks in the back for him, just in case he’d come in.

This Friday was different.

Phelps died “suddenly and easy” while sitting in his sofa chair, playing guitar at his San Francisco apartment on Thursday, March 14, his uncle Clark Phelps told The Chronicle. He was 56. A cause of death has not been released.

Simon Wilke of Seattle airs over a hip with graffiti dedicated to the late Jake Phelps, SF skateboarding legend and Thrasher magazine editor, at Potrero Del Sol skatepark in San Francisco on Friday, March 15. Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

Phelps’ absence was palpable at local skate parks and shops. There was a forlorn kind of finality in the air as Slattery described him. Though for many he was an epic character, the subject of skateboarding folklore and a celebrity who never lost his light, he was also a down-home character on the streets of San Francisco. Sean Gutierrez, who had known Phelps for nearly two decades, said Phelps often skated more than 12 miles a day. One of his regular routes was to “bomb” down Polk Street, head up to Fisherman’s Wharf, jump in the water with all his clothes on, zip through North Beach and head back down to the Mission.

The board Slattery mounted at Deluxe on Friday was the one Phelps was riding when he nearly died “bombing” a hill on Dolores Street in 2017, an accident that nearly cost him his life. Slattery said they all thought he’d be done after that, but Phelps, in signature fashion, bounced back more revitalized.

“He was supposed to be going 25, but he was always going 100,” Slattery said. “He might have been 56, but he didn’t know that. If anyone didn’t care about his mortality, it was him.”

His devotion to skateboarding brought him close to death more times than he could count. He’d been hit by practically anything imaginable — a car, a bus, a van — and said he had been stabbed in the chest, and almost murdered in a drive-by shooting in Antioch, according to a 2016 interview with California Sunday.

He embodied the rawness of the sport and he was polarizing, but unanimously respected, Slattery said. “He was built differently. Up earlier than everyone else, skating earlier than everyone else,” Slattery said. “He was cut from a different cloth — might have been closer to sandpaper than satin, though.”

Underneath his gruff, relentlessly tough exterior, he was intuitive and generous, Slattery said. He could sense fear and he pushed everyone he met — adults and children alike — to be the best, wildest, and gnarliest skateboarders they could be. Most of all, he wanted people to skate; if they didn’t have a board, he bought them one, no questions asked. The last time Slattery saw him was at Deluxe, where he picking up a skateboard for a child with cancer.

Phelps’ death was first reported on social media on Thursday by Thrasher owner Tony Vitello, son of the late Thrasher founder Fausto Vitello.

“I never met anybody who loves anything more than Jake worshipped skateboarding,” Vitello wrote on Instagram. “Just as we need food and water to survive, Jake needed skateboarding to keep his blood pumping. It was more than a hobby or a form of transportation or way of life — it was his oxygen.”

His laser-focused devotion to skating soon transcended to the skateboarding community at large. Phelps took over editorship of Thrasher in 1993, and reigned over its growing influence over two decades. The sacred quality of the San Francisco-based publication — named after punk rock slam-dancing and the magazine known as the “bible” to many skaters — never waned, even as the print industry became increasingly fraught.

He didn’t just embody “skate or die,” which he printed on his business cards, it was the way he lived. Phelps told The Chronicle in 1996 that a collision with a 7 Haight bus in 1986 almost cost him his left leg. The doctor told him never to skate again, but Phelps picked up his board three days after his cast came off. He was even skating at the time of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

“In the case of Jake, the task becomes wrapping your head around just how many lives one person could possibly live,” Vitello wrote. “He really did see it all, do it all, and that incredible brain of his could relish every last detail.”

Jake Phelps was born Sept. 25, 1962 in San Francisco, and lived in California until he was 11 years old. After his parents divorced, he decided to live in Marblehead, Mass., with his mother, who was from San Francisco. He began working at a skate park in Cambridge, Mass., when he was 14.

His skateboarding promise was clear at a young age, and soon he was sponsored by Pepsi and began traveling, demonstrating his skills at other schools. His success in the sport prompted him to drop out of high school by the end of the 1970s.

By the early ’80s, he moved back to San Francisco and started working at Concrete Jungle, a skate shop in the Haight. That’s where he met Tommy Guerrero, a professional skateboarder and owner of Deluxe, and Kevin Thatcher, Thrasher’s first editor. After a brief time writing product reviews for the magazine, he was offered a job in the company’s shipping department and quickly rose up the ranks.

“He really shaped the voice and the content and the path of Thrasher magazine,” Guerrero said. “He was the voice of literally millions of skateboarders. He was the eyes and the vision, and he kept it as true to his roots as he possibly could.”

In August 2005, Phelps started the hardcore band Bad S—, with pro skater Tony Trujillo and his wife, Ashley “Trixie” Trujillo. The trio, with Phelps as lead guitarist, toured worldwide. Gutierrez said that he was still working on music at the time of his death; his band was about to release a new studio-produced album.

He wrote about his life as a musician in a piece for Thrasher called “Party’s Over,” which also meditated on his thoughts about getting older, substance abuse and his inextricable tie to skateboarding.

“I love the sounds of skateboarding: slams, collisions, grinds yelling, screams, snapped bones — it’s called bein’ alive. I never had kids but I love helpin’ people that skate see thing a new way,” Phelps wrote. “… I can honestly say nothing makes me happier than seeing the look on some kid’s face when they first scare themselves: their eyes.”

Phelps could be found zipping through traffic on the streets of San Francisco on his skateboard — as recently as the afternoon before his death — often at Potrero del Sol skate park, which he reportedly designed. His pair of signature Ray-Ban glasses are even embedded into the concrete.

A memorial is set up where the late SF skateboarding legend and Thrasher magazine editor Jake Phelps’ glasses are cemented into wall at Potrero Del Sol skatepark in San Francisco. Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

On Friday, a shrine to Phelps was delicately arranged by the corner of the skate bowl. Cardboard was taped to the fence, with a few messages memorializing him, and someone had tagged his name in large letters inside the bowl itself.

In December, Thrasher opened a space at 66 Sixth St. in the Tenderloin — part retail, part clubhouse — for the brand’s devotees. A manifesto by Phelps appears by the entrance of the building: “Skateboarding vs. San Francisco is war. It’s 49 miles chock full of cops, vagrants, speeding cars, gang bangers and, the most humbling of all, the hills.”

Before the store opened on Friday, bouquets of flowers with letters of condolences attached had already been shoved through the security gate.

“I wish peace and healing to the family and friends of Jake Phelps whom I did not know personally but occasionally saw skateboarding in S.F.,” read one letter signed Gracia Natata. “The feeling of bonding remains in the soul of anyone who boards on pavement, water or mountains.”

Phelps is survived by his parents Kitty and Kendall Phelps, his sister, Marie Phelps, and two nieces, who all live in the Bay Area; two uncles, Fred Phelps of Manhattan and Clark Phelps; and his aunt, Bonnie Sucec of Salt Lake City.